When this brief press release about the Brooklyn Museum’s “transformative reinstallation of the American Art galleries” hit my inbox two weeks ago, my surprised reaction was: Haven’t we been there and done that, relatively recently? Going beyond that cryptic announcement is this more comprehensive description of the content and concepts of the new presentation.
As may be remembered by CultureGrrl devotees and Wall Street Journal readers (not to mention Brooklyn Museum aficionados), I came down hard on the museum’s 2016 “sweeping overhaul of the encyclopedic museum’s distinguished permanent collection of American art in a mere seven months,” as I described that rushed undertaking in my above-linked WSJ review from Sept. 20, 2016.
To my mind, the result was a misfire, as reflected in the editor’s subhead for my putdown:
The quick turnaround of the latest comprehensive re-do suggests that today’s Brooklyn curators may have found some merit in my critique of the previous rehang of the museum’s Luce Center for American Art.
As I wrote then:
The new installation is sabotaged by political polemics: It seems perversely fixated on what’s shameful in our country’s past. While it’s legitimate to raise uncomfortable issues, the relentlessness of the negative critique makes the installation sometimes seem less a celebration of American culture and achievements than a recitation of our nation’s faults.
Exemplifying this methodological illogic was fact that the 2016 reinstallation was “brought to fruition by assistant curator Connie Choi, a month before Brooklyn’s new full curator of American art, Kimberly Orcutt, arrived on the scene,” as I reported in my WSJ piece. There’s been yet another regime change, with Stephanie Sparling Williams as the current Curator of American Art and Kimberli Gant as curator of modern and contemporary art, as announced in the museum’s 2021 press release (no longer on the museum’s website but retrieved from my emails):
Sparling Williams stepped up to her current post from positions as associate curator at the Mount Holyoke College Art Museum, South Hadley, MA, and visiting lecturer in art history and African American studies at Mount Holyoke. Gant had been curator of modern and contemporary art at the Chrysler Museum, Norfolk, VA.
The in-progress 5th-floor reinstallation (opening Oct. 4, in conjunction with the museum’s 200th Birthday Celebration) comports with the current “woke” sensibilities that inform many of the Brooklyn Museum’s presentations: “Black feminist and BIPOC perspectives act as through lines in this vast presentation of more than 400 works,” according to the museum’s announcement. “In each of eight galleries, you’ll find a thought-provoking framework inspired by the abundant contributions of historically marginalized cultural producers.” Curators and “NYC drag queens” both have roles to play here, as the announcement notes. “Paradigm-shifting interactions with millennia of art” are the new order of the day.
Below is the signature image of the reinstallation, as featured in the American art galleries’ new press release, titled: Toward Joy: New Frameworks for American Art:
Estate of Laura Wheeler Waring
Photo: Brooklyn Museum
Works by Waring (1887-1948) also appeared in the Metropolitan Museum’s recent Harlem Renaissance show, where (as I wrote here) I was “stopped in my tracks by the transfixing star power of this portrait’s regal subject”:
Photo by Lee Rosenbaum
With all the staff turnover at the Brooklyn Museum under the directorship of Anne Pasternak (who assumed her post in 2015), I was very glad to see that at least one expert whom I’ve long admired, Nancy Rosoff, senior curator, Arts of the Americas, still remains.
I must also say that notwithstanding my reservations about some of the changes that Pasternak has brought about, I’ve admired much of what she has accomplished, and I deplore the attacks to which she has recently been subjected.
The last should go without saying. These days, regrettably, it needs to be said.